“Here is your God.” Behold, your God. Those are the words we heard from the book of
Isaiah. It goes on: He comes with
vindication, with divine recompense, he comes to save you. It goes on, talking of all the miraculous
healing that will happen, all great cause for rejoicing on this Gaudete Sunday, the Sunday of
rejoicing. But, the future, what will
happen, can distract us, almost water down, the exultant immanence of the
Hebrew acclamation: Hinneh elohekem! “Here
Is your God.” Not, here’s the
spot where he will be, just hang on; certainly not, there’s where he will be,
but he’s distant now, so don’t bother Him.
No. Here is your God. The cry might go up… “where?”
Imagine hearing
this scripture in Jesus’ time. Imagine
yourself a Palestinian Jew, a lost sheep of the house of Israel, a member of an
exploited client kingdom of the Roman Empire, a peasant farmer maybe,
constantly in fear of a poor harvest.
You’re faithful, and you trust wholeheartedly that God will come and
water this desert so that it will bloom, but right now, not much is
blooming. You’re hungry. “Here is
our God?” Where? Certainly not in Herod, the King who was
meant to be God’s servant, a king who should show forth God’s providential care
in his beneficent reign. No, Herod Antipas
was selfishly opulent at best, and as ruthlessly oppressive as Rome would allow
the rest of the time. But there had been
someone, someone who made you feel that God could actually be close to you here
and now.
He was odd,
decidedly odd. There was no denying
that. But compelling; strangely
compelling. You didn’t go out into the
desert to see someone like Herod, dressed in fine clothing. You weren’t attracted by money, by the reed
that adorned some of Herod’s coins. This
odd man on the outskirts, he was what drew you.
He talked of the coming judgment, that you knew all about, but then he
invited: repent, and be baptized, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. Here,
is this God you found here? In the man who said that these Jordan waters,
this rather unimpressive stream, could wash you clean of the sins that bound
you? But he’s in prison now, because
your world is one in which everything good gets locked up and then killed. Where is God?
And now
there’s another man, a wandering teacher, homeless it seems. Funny accent, they say he was born in
Bethlehem, but grew up in Egypt of all places and then moved to Nazareth, some
Hicksville village you’ve never heard of, and nobody’s quite sure who his real
father is! And you keep asking him who
he is, “are you the one we’re waiting for?”
And he won’t give a straight answer. He just keeps on healing
people! Here is our God?
Yes. Here is our God. Not in opulence, not in green pastures. In the desert. In the odd one. In the other.
In those outside the limits of polite conversation. In those in whom at would be very easy to be
offended. But the route is happiness is to
not be offended at him. Some people live
there on those margins. Those are the
people to whom we need to constantly be proclaiming, “Here is your God!” That proclamation could be in words. Or it could be in deeds. Jesus just kept on healing. It’s only God who can wash away sins. It’s only God who can make a desert
bloom. But we’re not powerless, not most
of us, at least, gathered here.
For those
of us who don’t live on the margins, that place where we can say “Here is your
God,” we can go there. In my religious
family, the Congregation of Holy Cross, we have Constitutions, a rule for our
life, and they tell us to “stand with the poor and the afflicted, because only
from there can we appeal as Jesus did for the conversion and the deliverance of
all.” Only from there.
When I
walked here tonight past the garden that grows food that feeds our
neighborhood, I heard “here is your God.” When I see the sign-ups to serve the
dinner at the shelter, I hear “here is your God.” In all the ways in which
people of this parish go to the margins, whether officially through parish
auspices or not, we hear “here is your God.”
Here at this table, in this font, in that reconciliation room, is
proclaimed to us again “here is your God.”
Here, in our hunger, we are fed. In
our need, we are given a word to lighten the heart of another. Here is our God.
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